Norman Podhoretz wrote the memoir “Making It” in 1967. Long out of print, it has been reissued 50 years later by New York Review Books Classics (354 pp, $17.95).Mr. Podhoretz, who has a summer home in East Hampton, is a well-known neoconservative and was for 30 years the editor of Commentary, a Jewish journal of opinion that is partly responsible, along with William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, for the drift from left to right in our politics that helped elect Ronald Reagan, Presidents Bush, father and son, and, to a lesser extent, Donald Trump.
He also moved up in the world, from being “a filthy little slum child,” as one of his early teachers called him, living in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, to a literary eminence in Manhattan. He says, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”
That same teacher, whom he identifies as Mrs. K, recognized his high intelligence and made it her mission to smooth his rough edges and give him an intellectual and personal polish that he lacked. This was the teenager who dressed like a greaser and said things like “I goink op de stez,” when as a child he was asked where he was going.
Mrs. K was, as it happened, quite successful in her mentoring efforts. Mr. Podhoretz won a full scholarship to Columbia, where he studied with Lionel Trilling, and pursued postgraduate work at Cambridge University, where he studied with F.R. Leavis.
These two great literary critics steered him away from his original ambition to be a poet and in the direction of literary criticism. His early work appeared in Commentary in the United States and in Leavis’s magazine Scrutiny in Great Britain. He was on his way. He was also published in Partisan Review, and continued—despite the influence of Mrs. K, who wanted to turn him “into a facsimile WASP”—to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“Making It” is not a conventional memoir. It is the story of a man who worshiped at the altar of what William James called “the bitch goddess Success.” “Let me introduce myself,” he begins. “I am a man who at the precocious age of thirty-five experienced an astonishing revelation. It is better to be a success than a failure. Having been penetrated by this great truth concerning the nature of things, my mind was now open for the first time to a series of corollary perceptions, each one as dizzying in its impact as the Original Revelation itself. Money, I now saw (no one, of course, had ever seen it before), was important. It was better to be rich than it is to be poor.” But it was not just wealth that he was pursuing. He wanted to be taken seriously as a critic. He wanted to be eminent and to be invited to the best parties.
He received his first brush with notoriety when he wrote a scathing review of Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” for Commentary. “Augie March” was widely admired, considered Bellow’s best book to date, and is still regarded, by many, as Bellow’s finest novel. Bellow was furious with this young upstart (“young Mr. P”) and never forgave him.
The magazine that accepted a good deal of his early work was Partisan Review, the home of so much intellectual ferment, which began as the literary arm of the John Reed Club, and was affiliated with the Communist Party USA. The magazine, edited by Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, soon became disillusioned with communism and became strongly anti-communist, though still left-leaning. Mr. Podhoretz began, however, as a contributor to Commentary. Upon the death of Commentary’s first editor Elliot Cohen, Mr. Podhoretz was chosen to succeed him and went on to hold the position for 35 years. In that time, he gradually shaped Commentary in his own image.
Mr. Podhoretz is most interesting when he writes about the writers who he considered the Partisan Review crowd: “the family.” They included his literary mentor Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Mary McCarthy, the “dark lady” of the group, who was supplanted by yet another “dark lady,” Susan Sontag.
When “Making It” first appeared, it created a literary tempest. Mr. Podhoretz was vilified and ridiculed. The book covers the period before he embraced neoconservatism, so it depicts a man who is less familiar to us now.
Yet, though it caused a scandal in its day, its theme seems rather tame today, perhaps because of Mr. Podhoretz’s own influence. “Making It” is extremely well-written, often elegantly so, and a snapshot of a world where ideas still mattered. A world that no longer exists.
on Aug 29, 2017